The New York Times Best Book of the Year, 1997Time Magazine Best Book of the Year 1997Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is... show more

The New York Times Best Book of the Year, 1997Time Magazine Best Book of the Year 1997Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatch'd pair--one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic--from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.

Jenny found this helpful link: http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_PageOpening: Snow-balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware, - the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried...

I liked this most of the books by Pynchon I've read so far. There's some genuinely beautiful writing in there, and the personal odysseys of the characters are all the more compelling for being refracted through a kind of mad inventive genius that is able to blend 'realism' quite seamlessly with the ...

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